There's a Fedora remix available, but no Raspberry Pi to run it on.

The Raspberry Pi foundation has suffered a production setback that could delay delivery of the organization's $35 Linux computer. The manufacturer accidentally used ethernet jacks without integrated magnetics, built-in transformers that provide DC-isolation and help filter noise.

The wrong jacks have been soldered to the Raspberry Pi boards and will have to be removed and replaced before the product can ship to end users. According to the foundation, the ethernet jacks are relatively easy to replace. The problem is that sourcing a sufficient quantity of the right ethernet jacks might take some time. This will be the second time that the Raspberry Pi project has suffered a minor delay due to component sourcing difficulties.

"All the stock of jacks we believed we had in place and ready to turn into the ethernet ports on your Raspberry Pis turn out not to be the correct part, so we’re having to start again and move through the negotiating/ordering/delivery cycle as fast as we can," a representative of the foundation said in a statement on the organization's blog.

The foundation says that it discovered the problem with the ethernet jacks several days ago, but waited until now to disclose it because they wanted to be sure that there were no other issues. The organization apologized for the delay and asked its eager customers to remain patient while the matter is resolved.

The Raspberry Pi foundation was originally formed with the aim of building an inexpensive computing system for young students to use to learn computer programming. As the project matured, it exploded in popularity and attracted the interest of many Linux enthusiasts and embedded systems hobbyists. The first model, which sells for $35, entered the manufacturing stage last month. The foundation's retail partners were flooded with demand when the product became available for purchase last week.

The Raspberry Pi computer is a bare ARM board that is roughly the size of a deck of playing cards. It has a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. It will boot from an SD card and has a GPU that is reportedly competitive with that of modern smartphones. The first manufacturing run consists of 10,000 units, which fans are eager to use for projects ranging from wearable computing experiments to building tiny multimedia set-top boxes.

Alongside the official retail launch, the Raspberry Pi foundation announced that it has partnered with UK component makers Premier Farnell and RS Components. These companies are handling sales fulfillment for the first batch, but will handle production themselves after the first 10,000 units sell out. The foundation opted to transition to a licensed manufacturer model in order to ensure that there will eventually be enough units to meet demand.

In addition to disclosing the delay, the Raspberry Pi foundation also announced the availability of a special Fedora build that is tailored to run on the Raspberry Pi computer. The distribution, which is called the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix, will provide a relatively complete computing environment for the low-cost ARM board. It is the Linux distribution that the foundation recommends for use on the Raspberry Pi hardware.

The software platform, which is based on the open source Fedora Linux distribution, was developed by a team at Seneca College's Center for the Development of Open Technology. The school, which is located in Toronto, is well known in the open source software community for its involvement with various projects, particularly its engagement with Mozilla on Web-related research.

As Raspberry Pi foundation director Eben Upton explained in a recent interview with Linux User and Developer Magazine, the latest version of the popular Ubuntu distribution will not run on the device because Ubuntu doesn't support the ARMv6 architecture, which is used by the Raspberry Pi board's ARM11 CPUs. Ubuntu's ARM port is focused on the ARMv7 architecture, which is used by Cortex-class ARM processors.

The Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix will give users the option of using the LXDE or XFCE desktop environments. It also comes with the Firefox Web browser, the GIMP image editing tool, the GNOME office suite, and a number of software components to enable development on the device, including runtimes for Python, Perl, and Ruby.

In addition to this fairly rich stack, users will also have access to additional ARM-compatible packages from the Fedora repositories. The distro also bundles several proprietary components that are needed to enable all of the board's capabilities, such as hardware-accelerated video processing.

More details about how to download and install the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix can be found at the foundation's blog.